Hello, I'm wondering if using Python to allow the robot to locate itself is viable or useful. We were interested in the idea of having the robot make a path during autonomous through localization, finding itself somehow. Is this viable or should we just go with predetermined routes based on its starting position?

Localization is a strategy that isn't really affected by your choice of language.

It's fairly simple to estimate the pose of the robot from a starting position using the kinematics of skid-steer and some sensors (an encoder on each side, or two encoders and a gyro.)

Absolute localization is a little bit harder and not at all trivial. You need some feedback based on stimuli in the real world. The first thing that springs to mind is using a camera to determine where the robot is relative to the vision tape on the switch to get an initial pose, then tracking it through the aforementioned kinematics.

Generally though, you should try to place your robot in the same place every time (for a given autonomous strategy.) This makes the initial step of absolute pose determination unnecessary.